Let's not delude ourselves.

Migrants come to Australia for economic reasons, not because they have some affinity for Australia's people or culture. The presense of thousands of Chinese spies in Australia, or the fact that many Chinese migrants refer to Australians as “foreign devils” (yang guizi) hardly indicates some great loyalty or respect for Australians and their culture and values, now does it?

"One nation, one destiny"? Wasn't that the point of Federation?
Can you imagine the Federationists getting up and saying "We propose uniting the colonies together, even though it means absolutely nothing."

There was no "infamous White Australia Policy". We had a BRITISH-biased immigration policy. And why wouldn't we; they're the ones who created the colonies! British people just happen to have pale skin.
The limits were extended to Europeans eventually, not because they're "white", but culturally related.
At the time, we had a "populate or perish" mentality, so wanted LOTS of migrants, but not just from ANYWHERE.
We needed some guarantee of continued stability. The criteria pre-MC was always culture, not race. We may be a nation of migrants, but until recently all of them were culturally related.

Culture isn't just how you cook food or ornament your attire. It is your entire life, mind, being, reality.
If an individual person asserts they have multiple realities, we put them in a padded cell, but we are supposed to believe that disconnected cultural realities within the same society are wonderful, beneficial, benign and could never have negative consequences!

The writers use the term "forcefully assimilate". Who ever FORCED assimilation. The very word acknowledges the notion of gradual adaptation. Assimilation is inevitable over time, provided it isn't "forcefully prevented".

And just what are "the potentially dangerous and socially destructive consequences of the proposed cultural assimilation approach"? The authors don't say. The French example in fact shows the dangers of multicultural immigration, not the dangers of assimmilation.

"Speaking in terms of “dominant cultural patterns” invariably overlooks the reality: that Australia’s social fabric is not just British and Judeo-Christian".
Yes, but it's MOSTLY British and Judeo-Christian, and as that's where we came from, that IS the reality.

"Suppress something and people will feel resentment". Yes, like suppressing the notion of a shared history, identity, reality, that has a known and obvious origin: Britain/Europe/Western Civilisation.

This article is about as nutritious to the mind as a marshmallow is to the body. PC propaganda.

Shockadelic asserts, 'There was no "infamous White Australia Policy".'

Attorney-General Alfred Deakin, introducing the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, told Parliament:

'…we should be one people without the admixture of other races…[T]hey do not and cannot blend with us;…we do not, cannot and ought not to blend with them.'

With regard to the non-whites Indigenous people, Deakin said they were ‘a dying race’ but ‘…let us hope that in their last hours they will be able to recognise not simply the justice, but the generosity of the treatment which the white race, who are dispossessing them and entering into their heritage, are according them.’

Of the other thousands of non-whites already in Australia (e.g. Pacific Islanders, Chinese and Afghans), Deakin said a small number could be made honorary whites but the majority would have to be deported.

Deakin mounted a curious argument about the Japanese. We should exclude them ‘in the most considerate manner possible,’ he said, because they were ‘the most dangerous because they most nearly approach us’. They were dangerous because they were the most likely to be able to be our economic competitors. So skilled Japanese entrepreneurs were not wanted because they represented a threat but unskilled whites were welcome. (Warhaft, ed. Well May They Say: the speeches that made Australia, Black Inc, 2004, pp. 216-226)

During the war with Japan, Labor Prime Minister John Curtin was quite frank, saying ' this country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race' (Fact Sheet No 8, DIMIA, 26 November 2003).

By 1956, the year of the Melbourne Olympics, the Liberal Minister for Immigration, Sir Alexander Downer (Senior), announced that Australia would grant residency rights to non-Europeans who were ‘distinguished and highly qualified’. ‘We have no objection’ said Downer, ‘to Asians of distinguished character and achievement coming to live amongst us.’ (Leck & Templeton, Bold Experiment; a documentary history of Australian immigration since 1945, OUP 1995 p. 166).

The White Australia Policy had begun to be dismantled.

Surely, Dresdener, migrants come here for a better life and not all of them are simply low-skilled in general fields criminals, Nazis and fascist collaborators as predominantly a post-WWII wave of immigration swept into Australia.

And Vietnamese board people of late 70/80th hardly possessed any qualifications but murdering and prostitution in South Vietnam either.

Educated Chileans and Serbians as many others, even Australian-born returned to their nations’ cradles as conditions there changed.

Very shy and near-unnoticed results of somewhere-in-Sydney university research slipped two days ago via some stations: recent migrants to Australia are much better educated and experienced than AUSSIES. It seems, channel 7 provided comments of migration gurus covering with smiles and sophisticated English a reality of mere racism not allowing deployment of bright talented non-Anglo professionals locally.

Any wonder that Chinese are being accused by some in spying around? Illiteral rednecks are always paranoiac, in Australia or wherever where no personal merits but royalties and protectionism based on caste difference, mafia belonging or simply mateship or “inherited right” rule.

Shockadelic is correct in asserting that there was no 'infamous White Australia Policy'. Rather, Australia's immigration program was aimed at preserving the nation's Anglo-Celtic character. People tend to forget that Canada, New Zealand and other countries also had similar policies.

Following Arthur Calwell's 'Populate or Perish' warning, immigration was widened to include other Europeans, on the grounds that they were ethnically and culturally similar to Australia's host population and would be able to assimilate rather seamlessly.

Curtin's quote about Australia remaining “forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race” is not an example of egregious racism. Rather, it was an expression of Curtin's belief in ethnic nationalism, a form of nationalism still practised by the vast majority of the world's nations. Furthermore, Curtin's quote was made during the context of WWII, when the threat of Japanese invasion was real.

I dare say that the ever evasive FrankGol is guilty of oversimplification. He appears unwilling or unable to look at immigrants in terms other than 'white' and 'non-white', ignoring notions of ethnicity, culture and civilisation.

In 2002, India began issuing residency cards to the 20 million “people of Indian origin” currently living in Western countries, specifically writing the legislation to exclude any European people born in India. To use crude and imprecise terms, does this mean that India has a 'Brown India Policy'? Is this an example of a racist immigration policy?

This is an issue of almost total, mind-numbing hypocrisy among Western governments and intellectual elites. They defend the inalienable right of other peoples – the Palestinians, the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the East Timorese – to invoke the right of ethnic nationalism, but not their own peoples.

Shockadelic said: "The writers use the term "forcefully assimilate". Who ever FORCED assimilation. The very word acknowledges the notion of gradual adaptation. Assimilation is inevitable over time, provided it isn't "forcefully prevented"."

Assimilation should not be the dirty word it has become in our Orwellian, multiculturalist, politically-correct society. Of course, the policy of assimilation was driven by the belief that immigration should serve the national interest. Contrast this with the present 'multicultural' picture of Western societies increasingly living with the disconcerting consciousness that they are being continuously transformed into extensions of the Third World through population movements and the formation of non-assimilating migrant diasporic communities in their midst.